Off-diagonal long-range order for the free Bose gas via the Feynman--Kac formula

Abstract

We consider the path-integral representation of the ideal Bose gas under various boundary conditions. We show that Bose--Einstein condensation occurs at the famous critical density threshold, by proving that its 1-particle-reduced density matrix exhibits off-diagonal long-range order above that threshold, but not below. Our proofs are based on the well-known Feynman--Kac formula and a representation in terms of a crucial Poisson point process. Furthermore, in the condensation regime, we derive a law of large numbers with strong concentration for the number of particles in short loops. In contrast to the situation for free boundary conditions, where the entire condensate sits in just one loop, for all other boundary conditions we obtain the limiting Poisson--Dirichlet distribution for the collection of the lengths of all long loops. Our proofs are new and purely probabilistic (a part from a standard eigenvalue expansion), using elementary tools like Markov's inequality, Poisson point processes, combinatorial formulas for cardinalities of particular partition sets and asymptotics for random walks with Pareto-distributed steps.